The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (8 page)

One incident in particular shows his arrogance and determination to be a law unto himself. While still stopping short of open rebellion, he summoned his vassals in defiance of the royal authority. One, by name MacLellan, the tutor or guardian of the young laird of Bombie, refused to answer the summons. Douglas seized him and held him prisoner in his island castle of Threave. This MacLellan was the nephew of Sir Patrick Gray, the captain of the King’s Guard, who protested to James. The King sent him to Threave with a letter in which he ordered Douglas to surrender his captive to Sir Patrick. Douglas greeted the royal messenger politely, and quoted the old proverb that it was ill to come between a hungry man and his dinner and that there was no good talking between a full man and a fasting. He invited Gray to sit and dine, after which, he said, he would read the King’s letter and they could settle the matter. Meanwhile he sent orders to prepare the prisoner. When Sir Patrick had eaten, Douglas read the letter and said he would grant the King’s request. He led him out into the courtyard, where the body of MacLellan lay beside the execution block. ‘There is your nephew,’ Douglas said, ‘but you have come too late, for he wants his head.’ Gray contrived to make his escape, waiting till he was safe across the drawbridge before cursing Douglas and promising revenge.
⁶

That James now had good reason to distrust, even fear, Douglas is evident. Equally he had to be cautious. If it came to a trial of strength, it was by no means certain that the King would win. It might be that he retained some of the liking and admiration that as a boy he had felt for the Earl. At any rate, he decided to make a personal approach. We know little of James’s character, no more than may be inferred from his actions; it is possible that he had the personal charm and magnetism that some of his descendants would display, and that he therefore believed that a meeting might resolve all differences. So he invited Douglas to come to Stirling Castle, in February 1452, and, to allay any fears he might have, provided him with a safe-conduct.

What followed is again dramatically recounted by Walter Scott:

The King received Douglas kindly, and after some amicable expostulation with him upon his late conduct, all seemed friendship and cordiality between James and his too-powerful subject. By invitation of James, Douglas dined with him on the day following. Supper was presented at seven o’clock, and, after it was over, the King having led Douglas into another apartment, where only some of his privy council and his bodyguard were in attendance, he introduced the subject of the Earl’s bond with [the Earls of] Ross and Crawford, and exhorted him to give up the engagement, as inconsistent with his allegiance and the quiet of the kingdom. Douglas declined to relinquish the treaty which he had formed. The King urged him more imperiously, and the Earl returned a haughty and positive refusal, upbraiding the King, at the same time, with maladministration of the public affairs. Then the King burst into a rage at his obstinacy, and exclaimed, ‘By Heaven, my lord, if you will not break the league, this shall.’ So saying, he stabbed the Earl with his dagger first in the throat, and instantly after in the lower part of the body. Sir Patrick Gray then struck the Earl on the head with a battle-axe and others of the King’s retinue showed their zeal by stabbing at the dying man with their knives and daggers. He expired without uttering a word, covered with twenty-six wounds. The corpse did not receive Christian burial.

Scott concludes: ‘This was a wicked and cruel action on the King’s part; bad if it were done in hasty passion, and yet worse if James had meditated the possibility of this violence from the beginning.’
⁷

The King has found his defenders. Eric Linklater, admitting that ‘assassination is not a comely or commendable exercise of government’, yet wrote that ‘if it is the only way – the only possible way – to remove a manifest threat to public safety and preserve peace under legitimate authority, it may be excused, and probably should be pardoned’. In his view, James had little choice when ‘faced with the naked intransigence of the most powerful of his nobles’.
⁸

The Scots parliament agreed. It declared that Douglas was guilty of his own death, being a traitor and conspirator, and so absolved the King of all blame. No doubt pressure was applied to bring about this favourable verdict, and surely Douglas’s friends and allies were either absent from proceedings or chose prudently to keep silent. Nevertheless, it is likely that there were many happy to see him removed.

The murder did not solve the Douglas problem, however, but instead exacerbated it. This was so probable an outcome that it is difficult to believe the crime was premeditated, even though the presence, with battleaxe ready, of Sir Patrick Gray, who had such good recent cause to wish to be avenged on Douglas, suggests otherwise. James may well have had a temper as fiery as the birthmark on his face.

The Douglas response was immediate and dramatic. The murdered Earl was succeeded by his brother, James. In March, only a few weeks after the murder, the new Earl rode into Stirling at the head of some six hundred horsemen, and beneath the walls of the castle, the scene of the crime, dragged the King’s dishonoured safe-conduct through the streets at the tail of an old grey mare. ‘This was the ritual of “diffidatio”, by which a vassal formally renounced fealty to his lord.’
⁹
The Douglas troops then set fire to the town and it seemed as if the blaze might spread across Scotland.

The King, it is said, came close to despair, appalled by what he had done, or at least by its consequences. He even spoke of abdicating and withdrawing to France. But this mood was temporary, and his chancellor, Bishop Kennedy, a man revered for both virtue and learning, told him plainly that he was not entitled to abandon his kingdom. Moreover, taking a sheaf of arrows, the Bishop showed him how to defeat his enemies. Banded together, the arrows could not be broken, but each snapped easily if taken by itself. In short, in order to secure victory, the King must first divide his enemies.

So he turned first on the murdered Earl’s ally Crawford in the north, and in alliance with the Gordons, a rising family in Aberdeenshire, whose head had recently been made Earl of Huntly, broke his power; Crawford’s estates were forfeited, and became available as rewards for loyalty and future bribes to secure support. At the same time, by a mixture of cajolery, promises and scarcely veiled threats, James contrived to detach the other branch of the Douglas family – the Red Douglases, whose head was the Earl of Angus – from their cousins. So, with the support of Parliament, and with the north at least quiescent, he was able to turn against his chief enemy.

He had much need to do so. The Earl and his twin brother Hugh, Earl of Ormond, had formally renounced their allegiance to James, and sent a message to Henry VI of England offering to do homage to him instead. But the suddenness of the King’s success against his allies caused the Earl to have second thoughts. For the moment he was prepared to forget his grievances, even forgive the King for his brother’s murder. James too, conscious of his own guilt – no matter what Parliament had declared – was ready to make peace. Douglas submitted, gave up his claim to the earldom of Wigtown and promised to make amends and also to do his duty as Warden of the Marches. In return James gave him back that disputed earldom and agreed to support a request that the Pope should grant the Earl a dispensation to permit him to marry his brother’s widow, Margaret of Galloway, on the grounds of non-consummation of her previous marriage. This was obtained, though it is likely that few believed that Margaret, a young woman of twenty, was still a virgin. To show his trust, James then sent Douglas to England as his commissioner to renew a truce between the two kingdoms.

His behaviour has puzzled historians, all the more so because the marriage once again reunited all the Douglas lands and gave the Earl the chance to revive, by right of his wife, the claim to the throne of Euphemia Ross’s descendants. One explanation that has been offered is that James’s lenient treatment of the man who only a few months before had exposed him to public humiliation when he dragged that dishonoured safe-conduct through the streets of Stirling was the result of some impulse of penitence for the murder of Douglas’s brother. But it may be that he had merely misread his opponent.

Once over the border, Douglas seems to have forgotten that the King had treated him generously and resumed his intrigues. The state of England was itself disturbed, for that year, 1453, saw an English army defeated in France, at the Battle of Chatillon; and that was the end of the attempt, twice near to success, of the English kings to conquer France. Only Calais now remained in English hands, and as so often, military failure provoked political discontent. The Lancastrian government was weak and discredited, the King, Henry VI, gentle and pious, unfitted to govern. His cousin Richard, Duke of York, had ambitions to supplant him. The sporadic conflict, to be known as ‘the Wars of the Roses’, was imminent; it would last thirty years. Douglas, seeing an opportunity for himself, approached York and secured the release, after so many years, of the aged Malise Graham, Earl of Menteith. Either he, senior representative of the line of Euphemia Ross, or Douglas himself might replace James Stewart as King of Scots, and York would have an ally, instead of a hostile presence, on the northern frontier. At the same time Douglas sent messengers to renew his murdered brother’s bond with John, Lord of the Isles. The King’s clemency, it was apparent, had achieved nothing. In the spring of 1455, Douglas crossed the Solway and mustered his forces. The size of his army is unknown; one chronicler credits him with 40,000 men, an impossible figure; in reality it was surely nearer 4,000.

James acted decisively. The time for conciliation was over. Douglas had had chances enough. His power must be destroyed. The Douglas castle of Abercorn in West Lothian was besieged. It held out for a month. In earlier times it might have sustained a longer siege, but there was a new weapon of war: artillery; and it was in the King’s hands. The castle was bombarded by ‘a gret gun, the quhilk a Frenchemen schot richt weel’.
¹⁰
The walls were broken and the castle stormed. The balance of power had shifted. Before the advent of artillery, the advantage in any siege lay with the defenders; now it had passed to the attackers. The gun was not absolutely new. There is mention of one in Scotland as far back as 1384, but James II was the first monarch to have acquired this ‘instrument called a gun’, or at least the first to understand its value. It has been suggested that as part of his wife’s dowry he had obtained guns made by the expert smiths of her native Flanders, and they were, in the words of Gordon Donaldson, ‘a weapon to which his subjects could not reply. It is probable that the great gun, Mons Meg, still on display by the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle, was one of his acquisitions; there is a gun of similar size and design at Ghent.’
¹¹

Douglas may have been unnerved by the taking of Abercorn, which he might have expected to hold out for months. He must certainly have been surprised by the rapidity with which the royal army now advanced against him, through the Ettrick Forest and into the heartland of Douglas territory. One of his allies, Lord Hamilton, quickly decided the game was lost and went over to the King. The Douglas force began to melt away, and the Earl himself followed suit. He fled to England, no doubt with the intention of seeking allies who would enable him to resume the struggle, leaving his brothers meanwhile to carry on the rebellion as best they could. Their best was soon shown to be insufficient. They were defeated at Arkinholm near Langholm, by their distant cousin the Red Douglas Earl of Angus. One brother, the Earl of Moray, was killed there; another, the Earl of Ormond, was wounded and captured. His wounds were patched up to fit him for execution as a traitor. The third, Douglas of Balveny, followed the head of the house to England.

King James was not finished yet. He brought up his guns and took the castles of Douglas and Strathavon. The island fortress of Threave in Kirkcudbrightshire held out for a few weeks before it too fell. It was a signal triumph for the Crown. The fugitive Earl languished in England, a pensioner, ‘until’, a citation reads, ‘he is restored to his heritage, taken from him by him who calls himself King of Scots’.
¹²
He would make intermittent trouble for years to come, but he was no more than an irritant. The Douglas power was broken and could not be repaired. James had displayed judgement and ability, and was now more securely master of his kingdom than any monarch since Robert the Bruce himself. The destruction of the Douglases in the spring and summer of 1455 entitles him to be regarded as among the most able of the House of Stewart.

The full extent of his mastery was soon made apparent. The Estates or Parliament, summoned to Edinburgh that August, condemned ‘James unquhill Erle of Douglas’, his mother and surviving brother as traitors, and declared that any correspondence with them was itself to be regarded as treason. Their estates were forfeited to the Crown, and the Estates declared that ‘as the pouertee of the crowne is oftymes the cause of the pouerte of the realme and mony uthir inconvenientis’, these lands and castles were to be inalienable Crown property. Since the main source of wealth was then land, this greatly enriched the Crown and for the first time raised the King high above his nobility, as being now by far the greatest landowner in the country. Moreover, the Estates granted him the customs duties for life. There were other enactments in this remarkable session. The office of Warden of the Marches, held by the earls of Douglas for generations now, was no longer to be hereditary, but a royal appointment. The rights of the nobility to private jurisdiction were restricted, and it was decreed that no new ‘regalities’ were to be created except with the consent of the Estates. All grants of heritable offices made since the accession of James I were revoked.